What are your intentions?...

In “I didn’t Plan it that way…” I posited that a plan, a well made plan, is the product of thought (i.e., a mind). Since I am a planner I took a look at some of the features within the process of planning that are indicative of intelligent design. Critics usually have at least three questions with regards to this line of thinking: 1) An omnipotent designer is not constrained by the laws of physics so why should purported evidence of precise timing be an indicator of divine design? 2) If an omnipotent designer could create in any way he desired, then virtually any evidence we find in the record of nature could be proposed as evidence for intelligent design. How is this falsifiable? 3) If this omnipotent designer is so powerful then why didn’t he just zap everything into existence? Of course there are variations of these questions, but these three pretty much cover the gist of the criticism I’ve run up against. These are valid questions. The key to understanding the answers to these questions, though, is to see that they ultimately focus on the intentions of the proposed divine designer (e.g., Why would an omnipotent designer do X when he could obviously do Y?). Let’s take a look at our plan for the construction of a cogeneration power plant. An outside auditor reviewing the plan notices that a critical piece of equipment is not being set as soon as it is ready but, instead, is planned to be set a few months after its most optimum time. This seems to run flat up against our tenet that a plan that is intelligently designed should have activities occurring as soon as possible. The planner on the job responds that the equipment setting is, in fact, occurring at the most optimum time. He then informs the outside auditor that the owner, besides being concerned with the overall completion of the power plant, is also concerned with his internal cash flow. The owner does not wish to incur the cost of the piece of equipment at its earliest possible time but would rather incur the cost a few months later. Due to this additional parameter, the setting of the critical piece of equipment was shifted to satisfy the requirements of the owner. After hearing the explanation the outside auditor withdraws his complaint. The designers of the plan had intentions that the outside auditor was unaware of. Once he was made aware of these intentions he understood that what at first appeared to be an anomaly in the plan was actually an integral part of the plan. The better we understand the intentions of a designer, the better we can understand the actions of a designer. Therefore, in contemplating the skeptic’s questions we see that our answers will be based upon our understanding of the omnipotent designer’s intentions. The skeptic may immediately raise a red flag and ask: How it is possible that you could know the intentions of an omnipotent designer? Good question. It is here that we must depart from our friends in the ID movement that prefer the Big-Tent approach, which allows all ideas of intelligent design to be posited without actually attempting to identify the identity of the alleged designer. For now we move from speaking of a generic omnipotent designer to Yahweh, the God of the Bible, as the only Omnipotent Designer. The Christian posits that it is well within our rights to know the mind of God and, in the process, His nature. The Christian believes that besides rationality and reason, the ability to know of abstract concepts such as equality, or numbers, is only possible in a mind. We argue that while these concepts come from a mind they are also eternal; therefore, if these concepts are eternal, then it logically follows that they must come from an eternal mind. Consider this quote from Ron Nash’ in his book, The Word of God and the Mind of Man:

…God has endowed humans with a structure of rationality patterned after the divine ideas in His own mind: we can know truth because God has made us like Himself. This helps explain how we can know not only the eternal Forms but also the creation that is patterned after these Forms. We can know the corporeal world because we first know and understand the intelligible world. As an inherent part of our rational nature, we possess forms of thought by which we know and judge sensible things. Because God has created humankind after His own image and continually sustains and aids the soul in its quest for knowledge, human knowledge is possible. God is the original source of the light that makes knowledge possible because He is the reason or logos of the universe. All the truths of reason have their ground in His very being; they subsist in His own mind. Because humankind was created in the image of God, the human mind is a secondary and derivative source of light that reflects in a creaturely way the rationality of the Creator. A harmony or correlation exists therefore between the mind of God, the human mind, and the rational structure of the world.

As Christians we believe that the Bible is God’s Word – His Special Revelation. Whether or not the skeptic believes this is of no concern in our argument for we have been tasked with producing what we consider to be God’s intentions as the Intelligent Designer of the universe. So in addressing the “why” in, Why would God do X when He could obviously do Y?, we first need to understand some of the attributes of God as revealed to us in Scripture. More to follow…